Inside / outside is a slang expression among players that is generally used in describing the tonal qualities of one's improvisations. An improvised line can be described as being either created from the key of the music being played, termed inside, or termed outside, implying that the pitches used to create the idea are borrowed from a different key center. Other musical terms such as diatonic ( inside ) or non-diatonic, ( outside ) are also commonly employed to describe such pitches or music. As the improvisations move further out, we often begin to border on polytonality then further to atonality. For example, check out how the following melody moves from being inside to outside. Example 1.
| inside | outside |
Same idea, moved up a half step from C to Db, moving from inside to outside. Cool with this? Pretty straightforward eh? Well yes, but isn't there any "middle ground" to this concept? Absolutely. Like to venture "slightly outside?"
So why is this important? Well depending on your musical directions, when soloing, creating ideas inside the changes provides a certain quality of stability, reducing artistic risk and the music is in a sense contained by its key center. 99% of the gorgeous lines we hear publicly are basically inside or diatonically generated. Developing the ability to go "outside" and still make musical sense, potentially opens up the whole chromatic resource of the equal tempered system for the creation of ones ideas, even while soloing within any one key center. Playing outside increases the musical risk factor exponentially but when confidently executed, can raise the level of excitement within the music dramatically. Do folk players ever go outside? Nope, very rare. Blues and the rockers? Well, probably not in the above fashion of example 1, but certainly they move back and forth across the inside / outside line with their blue notes and bending pitches. Many of rocker Eddie Van Halen's cool ideas would fall into this "outside" genre, as would many of the more modern rock fusion / thrash players who are purposefully moving away from conventional progressions, pitches and tunings. It's all cool, inside / outside, the idea is to be able to invision / hear / sing the line.
I remember a gig where upon completion of the first show, a couple asked, "when was the band going to really start getting "out there?" I responded that there was a good chance that the band was not going to go to "far-out", in that the room we were working in was just a bit to conservative for that approach to the music. Well, needless to say, they left before the next show, I think they were hoping to find another gig where the band was a bit more musically / artistically adventuresome. But their question prompted me to begin to think, play and listen in a new sort of way.
From that point on, I gradually came to realize that the music I was playing could potentially include a more adventuresome approach and still exist in a "conservative" musical environment. When shedding, I began to take chances with musical ideas, such as in the above example 1 or exploring further into the upper structure of chords. Perhaps to cycle one idea through a series of colors not diatonically related to the tonal center. Also to use more chromatic motion in my lines. I began to re-examine some of the mid and later material of John Coltrane and Pat Metheny's trio recordings and explore the library for other players I knew who ventured "outside." This exploration opened up some serious new artistic ground for me, greatly expanding my existing possibilities. Does the expansion of one's form of art demand a bit of artistic risk taking? Probably. I think I now have a better idea of what those folks were looking for.
How important is "taking risks" in improvised music? Historically, as far back as the 1920’s, we begin to experience an almost cacophony of "outside" sounds in the shout choruses of Dixieland Jazz. There is a raucous quality to that music that must have really turned some heads in its day. Still today, the infectious joy that is shared from players to players to listeners in that Dixie style is truly magic to behold. Theoretically, part of that joyous energy is created by the seemingly random mixing of the melodic lines, played over what was and still is, a rather infectious dance groove. In Dixieland music, the melodic lines contain quite a bit of the blues color, which in one sense does help to glue it all together and keep it tonally based in one key center. Is it possible that as the art form of jazz evolved from the Dixie style over the decades through and beyond bebop, that the excitement of the cacophony within the Dixieland sounds gradually evolved from a more blues basis to a more chromatic coloring? Does this mean that the later bands of John Coltrane were actually playing a sort of modern, chromatic Dixie? Well, that’s a bit of a stretch, but what if Mr. Coltrane and his band created lines with just the blues color, say in "Bb", disregarding the 12 bar blues form? Like a modal blues?
When we look at the major innovators of all of the styles of American music, we find a similar searching in the music. In many of these artists, their searching gradually becomes more chromatic in nature throughout the course of their careers. This chromaticism weakens the sense of a tonal center, allowing for wider range of melodic and harmonic possibilities. Nearly the whole history of American jazz can be fit into about 125 years, and after about two thirds of that time, some of the music within the genre had gone from tonal to atonal, from inside to completely outside. Covering the same tonal ground with the same equal tempered system took the Euro classical cats almost four hundred years. Does this mean anything? Comments / questions?
Not to be too much of master of the obvious, but there are endless degrees and variations to how "in" or how far "out" the music can go yes? One main concern in this text is that learners come to recognize tonic stability and the digressions away from it, from a logical, theoretical basis within the system, so as to be able to hear when a player "takes it out", and perhaps encourage some curiosity within the learner to figure out just what actually happened from a theoretical standpoint. For the learner to gradually experience first hand the potential excitement in taking the risk to go "outside" in their improvisations and to feel how the tonal gravity changes while moving from inside to out. And as we so often experience, it's often easier to get outside from in, the "how" of getting back inside perhaps illuminating the real magic of genius.
The composition suggested here for listening to the inside / outside concept is also perhaps the greatest jazz record to date. Thelonius Monk's "Straight No Chaser", as recorded by the Miles Davis Sextet on the record titled "Milestones", contains lots of interesting ideas, many of which cross back and forth across the inside / outside demarcation. The music cooks right along and is an amazing testament as to what some folks can do with a 12 bar blues. Check it out when time permits.
| Where to next? | ||||
|
Other artistic concepts topics in this section? How about artistic techniques?
Let them that would move the world, first move themselves. Socrates
